I WAS impressed by the Comment on the sacking of the former town clerk in last week's Malvern Gazette.

This lamentable affair has dragged on for over 12 months and will have cost the Malvern taxpayer a great deal.

By no stretch of the imagination can it be justified by claiming that the outcome is beneficial to the residents of Malvern because the council “now have a team of officers working in a safe and healthy working environment”.

It is nonsense to suggest that the staff have ever had to work in an unhealthy environment and the safety issue has been grossly exaggerated.

Anyone who has worked in an office knows that people do get shouted at to answer the phone. It doesn’t amount to physical injury. Isn’t it time the staff started behaving like adults?

I cannot see the point of having yet another inquiry and inviting members of the public to contribute.

The public needs to see the transcript of the summing up by the judge and we must be told how much this miserable affair has cost.

We already know that the council had a perfectly good procedure in place based on the Acas model.

The simple fact is that they failed to use it. The only other thing we need to know is whether anyone is prepared to take responsibility for what went wrong.

Alistair Macmillan

Malvern